Skin-Haunt

Our Words, At Sea

Ximena Keogh Serrano

Your word was naufragio.

When I asked you to give me a word that could speak to your present, you gave menaufragio. That sense of perdition. That sense of catastrophe. Shipwreck.Under the salt where water flows like the illusion of infinity, you scatter the particles of the mother you lost.

I give you my word, melancholy, because it is one that has shaped my skin matter.She is my right lung sometimes.Melancholy as in the experience of eating up the forever gone love object. When you cannot “properly” grieve, thinkers [I cannot trust] say that you enter into a state of melancholia.

Loss becomes you.

Because I do not believe in “proper” anything, I carry loss as an amulet. Wrap my body in its wail. See how it traverses me. This melancholic hymn sutured to silence. Takes me to places.She did after all,bring me to you –my very owncolonialbeast.

(following Carmen Giménez Smith)

In timeI learn how to dress my ungrievable loss, today she is this turquoise ring. Crushedin multiple places.

Tomorrow melancholy will be the sea I wear under skin. Look how wide and transparent this tissue can be. I am a glass vessel and these are my shattering blues that greet you.Laughter splashes through veins, & all you see are these waves.See how rage turns my water into salt splatter. Transmuted grief.

I will begin leaking tomorrow. My pores will ring out all the dead of the ocean- piercing skins with memory scenes. See how they weep.The whole city will feel the taste of sorrow as I crawl into their orifices. BecomeLiquid haunting.